"It's—" he gasped, "it's Heinrich Hilker!" and in his excitement he clutched at the barbed railing.
Larry stared and then started. A second later he clasped his thin fingers firmly round Bill's arm and pulled him back.
"Get hold of him on the other side, Jim," he said hoarsely. "Gee! If that isn't that traitor! If that isn't the man who shot Bill's father way back in the saloon in the Utah mine camp! If that ain't the agent that fired the bomb aboard the ship that brought us to Europe! Come back, Bill; if you shout you'll give yourself away, and the man, once he recognizes you, wouldn't stop at anything. Gosh! what a meeting! And what's he after?"
"After! After!" said Jim, beginning now to fully appreciate the position. "He's getting aboard that aeroplane as a passenger. He's dressed as a American. You bet he's—he's going off to be dropped in the American lines, where he'll act the traitor again, where he'll be a spy."
"Stop him!" Bill tried to shout, but Larry clapped a hand over his mouth and just stopped him; and there, as they stood, helpless to intervene, they watched the aeroplane take flight, watched the figure of the man they knew to be a despicable spy, dressed in American uniform, steal off into the heavens. Without doubt the man was gone to carry on his nefarious work amongst their unsuspecting comrades.
CHAPTER XVI Heinrich Hilker, Master Spy
Time sweeps along, and this gigantic contest which has engulfed the world spreads and grows constantly greater. The times in which we live are so momentous, and the incidents so numerous and so close at hand, that one is apt to lose grip of the general situation and to forget, in the vastness of our own responsibilities, that others than ourselves are concerned. Yet it were wise to dissever ourselves for a moment from our own particular and personal interest in this world-contest, and, standing aside as it were in some quiet niche—if one is actually discoverable when the world is aflame—to look out and survey the whole area of operations from that niche or point of vantage. We should see Britain and France, and now America too, locked closely with the enemy along the line of trenches from Nieuport to far-off Belfort on the Franco-Swiss frontier. In Italy we should catch a glimpse of King Victor's hosts, driven back from the Isonzo, in October, 1917, mourning the loss of a fertile province, and awaiting the onslaught of the Austrian hosts along the Trentino front and throughout the whole length of the Piave River.
In Salonika and adjacent parts there would appear British and French and Serbians and Greeks and Italians facing the Bulgarian cohorts. In Palestine, General Allenby's troops beyond Jericho and Jerusalem, in touch with the King of the Hadjiz, steadily driving the Turk before them. Farther east, in Mesopotamia, other British and British-Indian troops, sweeping steadily upward along the courses of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, leaving the Persian frontier behind them, with their right flank thrown out in the direction of the Caucasus. Behind these two last groups of British troops, in Egypt itself, would be seen teeming masses of troops ready to reinforce the Palestine and the Mesopotamian fronts, and prepared at any moment to subjugate the tribes in the western desert should they again venture to rise. But the Senussi have learnt their lesson. Elsewhere the Arabs, stirred up by German agents, and fed and paid by them, have likewise learnt that the British arm is a strong and a long one, and they too are glad to be at peace with us.